“The ship may sink and I may drink
A hasty death in the bitter sea;
But all that I leave in the ocean grave
May be slipped and spared, and no loss to me.
“What care I, though falls the sky,
And the shriveled earth to a cinder turn?
No fires of doom can ever consume
What never was made nor meant to burn.
“Let go the breath! There is no death
For the living soul, nor loss nor harm.
Nor of the clod is the life of God;
Let it mount, as it will, from form to form.”
When a train of cars stops suddenly at the depot, the energy that caused
it to fly along the track is not lost, it is only transformed. When a
tree is cut down, the energy that expressed itself in its trunk and
branches is not lost, it will only take other forms. When a horse dies,
the energy of which its life was the expression is not lost, it is
transformed. When a tree or a horse passes from the living world into the
world of inorganic things, the exact amount of energy in the body of the
living tree or horse takes other forms. The amount on the side of death
is equal to the amount on the side of life. If we consider man only as a
physical organism, the same may be said of him. The amount transformed
into earth and air, will be the equivalent of the organized fund of
bone, and sinew, and muscle, turned over to death. If we thus estimate
man, however, as we do a tree or a horse, have we taken into account the
entire sum of assets that were in his possession during life? What of
his thought, affection, and volition? When Kepler died, what became of
the intelligence that discovered the “Three Laws,” which constitute the
arches of the sublime bridge that spans the vast chasm between Ptolemaic
and modern astronomy? When Laplace died, what became of the spirit that
solved the problems of the Mécanique Céleste, by the aid of which the
irregularities of the heavenly bodies were reduced to order? When Adams
died, what became of the massive spirit that built in the depths of his
own study the planet Neptune, with no other raw material to work from
than the perturbations of Uranus? When Moses died, what became of the
affection that expressed itself in the training and civilization of a
race? When Jesus Christ died, what became of the love that sacrificed
itself for a sinful world?
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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